I was very, very sad to learn that John Riordan passed away yesterday morning after a long bout with cancer.
John was Past Vice Chairman, Past President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
John was Past Vice Chairman, Past President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
In 2001, John stepped down from a 15-year term as President and CEO of
ICSC. At the same time he was chosen as the Thomas G. Eastman Chairman of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Real Estate. In 2003, ICSC
announced the renaming of its professional development school as the John T.
Riordan ICSC School for Professional Development. Riordan has served on the
advisory boards of the MIT/Center for Real Estate, the Center for Real Estate
of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Business School
of Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has served as director
of General Growth Properties and Ivanhoe Cambridge. In 2003, John was elected
an ICSC Trustee for life.
I met John fairly early in his 15-year term as President and CEO of ICSC.
John was a true leader and visionary.
To me he was a good friend and voice of reason as my career
evolved. As I think back, in some
regards he was a mentor to me at different times in my life.
John was highly respected; as a person and as an executive. He led the ICSC during a period of
exceptional growth and globalization.
The John T. Riordan School for Retail Professionals is the pre-eminent
shopping center industry educational program at the ICSC.
In the past couple of years, he and I resurrected our contact via
lengthy and personal emails. I hadn’t
written to him in a while and hadn’t heard from him but just last week I wrote
him with an update and asked if he’d be open to me coming to visit him over the
summer.
Always prompt to reply, I didn’t hear back from him. Now I know why.
I went back to our most recent email exchanges and wanted to share some of what John wrote to me as it says a lot about the man John was. I was encouraging him to write a memoir and don't know if he started it - he lead such an interesting life and was a positive influence on so many people he came in contact with.
Dear Steve,
….Shopping centers and ICSC in the early 80's were becoming a world-wide
retail and member service revolution. Having been a frequent traveler to
western Europe in my college days and my early teaching years thanks to the
Experiment in International Living and speaking, as I do, the several
Romance languages helped a lot in growing ICSC internationally.
Once again success came from asking questions and together with new or
potential members, finding suitable answers.
Today the big question about the future of retail real estate concerns
learning to put the Internet to advantage. Easier said than done.
Current trends point to concentration of new generations in metropolitan
not suburban areas.--people for whom time is one of the most valuable aspects
of life. Locations where walking or using public transport is preferable
to long commutes by car to the workplace. Apartment dwellers who either
own or rent homes cared for by building staff. Shoppers for whom the
prime means of time-efficient shopping is a Wi-Fi connected device of one kind
or another, including one we still call a "phone" that tends be
with us at virtually all times everywhere in a purse or pocket!
Could it be that the day of the creative retail real estate architect is
over and that of the of the truly creative Urbanist is a hand to help answer
the big question: Now What? What to we do with all the empty retail real
estate?
**
Dear Steve,
We have a lot in common. I did not know you attended Fairleigh Dickinson. I'm from NJ and went to Montclair State on a full
scholarship in exchange for a promise to teach school in the state for at least
four years.
I did in the Princeton NJ public schools which for me at the time
was heaven. I was the editor of the student paper at Montclair, President of
a Fraternity, founder of the summer international travel program in conjunction
with the Experiment in Int'l Living of which I later became a trustee.--and
still able to be graduated in three and one half years rather than four.
Montclair's enrollment was 1200, today it is over 20, 000 and I have just
finished serving as chair of the advisory board for the colleges of the
humanities and the social sciences there and am now on the real estate advisory
group for its B school.
You may recall that on retirement from ICSC I
took on the full time chairmanship of the Center for Real Estate of MIT for
three years. Not the most satisfying assignment I have to say. We
have long lived in MA (now on Cape Cod) having come here after a stint
with McGraw Hill to work for Houghton Mifflin Company of which I ultimately
became a director and head of educational publishing then getting involved with ICSC and far more
interesting people like yourself. So books and publishing a big part of
my life.
I have not written one, but I have read a great many,
including Norman Kranzdorf's bio in which he lists me as among the more
interesting people he has known. My oh my! I believe him to have had a
fascinating life to date and count him as a good friend. Indeed, I had a
note from him only yesterday. I'll be pleased to get a coy of your book
when complete.
Your comments on health, longevity and the like are we'll taken. I
am very much aware of the niceties of geriatric medicine at this point having
endured in addition to cancer, a triple by pass, removal of a kidney, insertion
of two stents and in general having become a source of income for experts
in the area.
Let me know how things progress. Good to have renewed acquaintance
in this fashion.
All the best,
John
**
**
And, what I realize now is the last
note I received from John, the first week of January, 2017:
Dear Steve.
I am up early to find your good note and the copy of one to you from me
of so long ago.
Wow! Since what I wrote there has come to pass in most of the countries
cited and some of which I first got to know and some of which I got to visit so
long ago when I was involved first as a student and then when a school teacher
and group leader for an organization I am still affiliated with today,
The Experiment in International Living and its School for World Learning.
Founded around the time of World War II by a certain Donald Watt,
a scout master from Vermont, it has still today as its motto "Expect the
Unexpected." Something that I have adhered to all the rest of my life
since my first l957 contact with the organization of which I later became a
trustee.
Today, rereading what I wrote so long ago to you (and impressed that you
still have it) I would say that the unexpected is what is happening to shopping
centers and retailing in general.
It comes down to technological innovations and a major change in societal
values on the part of. Recent generations and their decisions on where and how
to live and the dramatically reduced rates and extent to which they
procreate. Simply put it is fewer people, living more and more in
metropolitan areas and having fewer and fewer children at the same time when
earlier generations past child bearing ages are living longer and longer and in
turn are leaving their suburban homes for closer in to city access to services.
All of this promoted in part by technology that is advancing at lightening
speed rendering the need for place less important for the acquisition of goods.
Bricks and mortar in the shopping center form are not needed as much as
they once were. Dreams of making malls gathering places for entertainment
are exaggerated and in the wrong places in any event as the suburbs are no longer
valued and will be less and less so as time goes by, as new automated
forms of transport are evolved and as already sophisticated automated delivery
systems are further advanced. The notion that retail real estate
locations will do better if state sales taxes are applied everywhere and the
Amazon-like advantage on price mitigated miss the real point of sales,
deliveries and returns by electronic means: speed is more important to
the buyer than the difference in price due to absence of state sales taxes.
I have just retired
after more than a decade as a director of Ivanhoe Cambridge, the real estate
arm of the Caisse de depot et de placement du Quebec and am familiar with the
situation there quite well, in part as I am a graduate of Laval University in
Quebec City and the Caisse is the moment manager for the major provincial
pension funds. I'd be interested to learn more of your interest in
Canada.
Steve, you have made my day and got my blood running at an early
hour. I am today beginning the 6th and last sequence of Chemo for
cancer--a cancer that is now gone thanks to the first five rounds but for which
this sixth is a kind of double check. I enter my 80th year in a few days
and hope to survive to the end of it at least, and perhaps a few more beyond
that.
All the best to you wherever you go and whatever path you take to get
there.
John
**
John touched a lot of lives, not the least of which is mine. I am privileged to have had him as a friend. He was a class act!
My condolences to John’s family and his many, many shopping center (and other industry) friends.
